Please Be Serious

Recently, Eliezer Yudkowsky participated in a very flawed podcast of Doom Debates that reflected poorly on him, and, likely to many people, the entire AI safety movement. The premise of the debate was that Eliezer Yudkowsky was offered 10,000$ to debate an anonymous "AI lab director", and this director quickly made the debate into a mess by interrupting, yelling, and using profanity. Sure, Yudkowsky may have come across as sane in comparison, but his opponent did make one critical point during the debate: Yudkowsky's agreeing to debate him in the first place may have been a mistake. To analyze why, think of other public figures. Generally, the more respectable and well-known the figure, the more exacting they are in choosing who to interact with publicly. This isn't just due to them having time constraints or options on which they can spend their time; it is also due to the fact that, as you become more respectable and well-known, your reputation also becomes valuable, and thus something worth protecting. If you frequently participate in farces like the recent Doom Debate, it diminishes people's respect for you and thus imposes a real cost. Yudkowsky's decision can surely be defended in this case. Perhaps Yudkowsky can deploy this money in a way that makes up for reputational damage, but this decision is just the first in a long line of choices to disregard reputational costs. For instance, Yudkowsky frequently wears bizarre and garish outfits. In the aforementioned debate, Yudkowsky wore the pictured steampunk-inspired outfit that looked right out of a comic convention. Ask yourself honestly, does this help or hurt his reputation and ability to convince others of his cause? Maybe if Yudkowsky had impeccable credentials and oodles of charisma and public speaking ability, these decisions would seem less important, but he has very few traditional credentials that will impress a new audience (Yudkowsky did not even graduate from high school, much less have a college de